Saturday, September 25, 2010

Dev Log - AI War "Midnight Starfields"

Exclusive first peek at a new music track coming in AI War 4.0! Check out how the tempo shifts around 1:40
or so in the video -- Pablo's outdid himself, as usual. The entire AI
War (and The Zenith Remnant) soundtrack is fully remastered for the
upcoming AI War 4.0, but there are also some new tracks (even outside of
the new Children of Neinzul expansion), and this is one of them.

This
music track is set to a visual display of the new starfields and
nebulae in the AI War 4.0. The quality and variety here is incredibly
better than in the older 3.x versions, and really gives each planet a
unique feel. Some of the ones right at the very end of the video
happened to be particularly awesome -- they were generating at random as
I clicked through them, so I never knew what I'd get (there are two
billion possible starfield/nebula patterns, this shows only a couple of
dozen).

Note that this is from within the Unity 3D editor, in
sort of a programmer test mode, so the bar along the top of the screen,
plus the little graphics status window at the top right, are both part
of the Unity 3D Editor and not part of AI War itself. Programmers in
the crowd might note how little graphics memory and how few draw calls
are actually needed here, though -- pretty cool, it's far less overhead
than what the uglier 3.x stars/nebulae needed! The fact of fraps
recording was dragging down the framerate into the 30-60fps range, but
without fraps on this same scene was rendering at about 600fps on my
machine.